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Poetry Pairing | ‘The Windhover’

By Shannon Doyne April 25, 2013 2:07 amApril 25, 2013 2:07 am

Photo

Sign of the rhymes: The audience at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the East Village, one of the many places in New York that present poetry in performance. Go to related article »Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

After reading the poem and article, tell us what you think — or suggest other Times content that could be matched with the poem instead.

Poem

Poet and critic Ange Mlinko first read Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover” as a teenager. She describes it as “a love poem directed not at a particular person…but to life itself.” In her guide to the poem, Ms. Mlinko notes that “Hopkins himself thought it was the best thing he ever wrote.” More than 130 years old, Hopkins’s sonnet begs to be read aloud:

The Windhover

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed
the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

Times Selection Excerpt

In the 2011 article “Open Mike, Insert Verse,” David Orr writes that poetry “has a long tradition of being
not only read but also performed vigorously”:

If you live in New York, the opportunities to hear poetry abound. Places like the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe are going strong, and the city’s Grand Establishments — notably Dylan Thomas’s old benefactor, the Poetry Center —
bring in the country’s most prominent writers. (And the world’s: Seamus Heaney opened the season there last week.) Meanwhile New York’s tradition of small-scale bar-based readings is ably
carried on by series like Mixer on the Lower East Side and Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg.

In a single weekend it’s possible to hear poetry received with an appreciative hush (as at the 92nd Street Y); paired with music (Mixer); and greeted with yells and scores (Bar 13). At its best it’s
a fluid scene perhaps best exemplified by the Bowery Poetry Club’s Page Meets Stage series. There the poetic impresario Bob Holman pairs “page” poets like Philip Levine with performance
poets like Taylor Mali. Daniel Gallant, the director of the Nuyorican, puts it this way: “I’m not that concerned with types or genres. We just want to give different audiences a chance to experience
art. And look, I love Shakespeare’s poetry, but seeing it performed is what made me able to appreciate it on the page.”

The poet Maureen McLane, who teaches English at New York University and has published two collections with Farrar Straus & Giroux, largely agrees, and she singles out the HBO series that showcased spoken-word
poets. “It’s striking how many students cite ‘Def Poetry Jam’ as their gateway performance poetry drug,” she said.

So where does all this leave Larkin’s objection that the reading of poetry can leave out, well, the poetry? It’s worth remembering that, as the poet Charles Bernstein smartly observed, the poem has
“a fundamentally plural existence.” A poem isn’t purely a set arrangement of words on a page, if only because versions may differ. Think of Emily Dickinson’s unique typography being
corrected by “helpful” editors.

Performance can create its own versions as well, and these, along with the words we read, give us the cloud of possibility that is the poem itself. In an e-mail, Paul Muldoon, poetry editor of The New Yorker, describes
performance as “an act of creativity and criticism combined, as was the writing of the poem in the first place.”

Visit this page to find out more about our collaboration with the Poetry Foundation, and to read ideas for using any week’s pairing
for teaching and learning.